In a bid to reinforce international
preparedness and response to pollution at sea, the Third Interregional Workshop
on Risk Assessment Tools for Pollution Preparedness and Response (PPR) from the
EU-funded and HELCOM-led
project took place in Valletta, Malta from 24 to 25 April 2018. “The workshop was an important step towards
providing pollution preparedness and response (PPR) guidelines at the regional
level,” said Valtteri Laine, the OpenRisk Project Manager at HELCOM and
moderator of the workshop. “We had hands-on sessions with open-source
risk assessment tools which are designed to facilitate decision-making in PPR,”
said Laine. The main focus of the event was on practical testing of existing
tools and those recently developed during the OpenRisk project, such as ,
ERC-M, , MARINRISK, FRAM and NG-SRW/ADSAM.
The tools help predicting maritime accidents and their consequences. In addition, the ISO 31000:2009 based
guideline for PPR risk management was also presented during the event, in order
to get feedback for finalization. This was the third workshop in a series of
four spanning from June 2017 to October 2018. The meetings aim at sharing
knowledge between European and global institutions and regional seas PPR
organizations, to further the development of toolboxes and guidelines for PPR
risk assessments. The Valletta-edition was hosted by the
Regional Marine Pollution Emergency Response Centre for the Mediterranean Sea () and moderated by HELCOM. It was
attended by other national administrations, intergovernmental regional organizations
and research institutions.
is a two year EU project on methods for maritime risk assessments on accidental
spills, carried out by HELCOM, the Malmö-based (WMU), Dutch marine research institute and the Finnish Environmental Institute (). The project is also supported by the
BONN Agreement (North Sea), the Copenhagen Agreement (Nordic seas), REMPEC
(Mediterranean), as well as the Norwegian Coastal Administration. In regards to pollution preparedness and
response, HELCOM countries will also carry out the held in
Karlskrona, Sweden later in August 2018, a large scale maritime response drill
at sea and on shore simulating leading to an oil and chemical spill.The presentations of the workshop in Malta are
available on the public of the OpenRisk 3-2018 Workshop.
In a bid to reinforce international preparedness and response to pollution at sea, the Third Interregional Workshop on Risk Assessment Tools for Pollution Preparedness and Response (PPR) from the HELCOM-lead OpenRisk project took place in Malta.
